As you all know, CSV files work perfectly with almost all the available databases and also consume very less space if compare to other file formats, due to which, for sharing the data between multiple applications most of the users prefer to extract and share the data in CSV files.
Google Sheets is also compatible with CSV files. One can easily import the CSV file into it, export the CSV file and convert it into a spreadsheet.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to import or convert CSV files into Google Sheets.
Import the CSV File from your Local System or Google Drive
- First, open the Google Sheets and go to the “File” menu and then click on “Import” from the dropdown menu.
- After that, click on the “My Drive” tab at the top left of the opened dialog box to insert the CSV file from Google Drive if already stored there.
- Otherwise, click on the “Upload” tab and then on “Browse” to select and insert the CSV file from the locally stored CSV files on your system.
- Once you are done with selecting the CSV file, it will start importing the file and open the “Import file” dialog box.
- Within the “Import file” dialog box, you have to choose the import location where you want to import the CSV file in Google Sheets.
- You can also choose or define the “Separator type” for the import file or leave it as “Detect automatically”.
- After selecting the import location and separator type, click on the “Import data” button and the file will get imported successfully within Google Sheets at the defined location.
- In the end, click on “Open now” and it will open the imported CSV file in the Google spreadsheet.
Note: Once the file gets imported, you can select and remove the unnecessary columns and also use the “CONCATENATE” function to merge two or more columns if required and also modify them per your need.
Convert CSV files to Google Sheets Using Google Drive
Sometimes, you may want to store and convert the CSV files within your Google Drive for later use. For this you can import multiple CSV files into your Google Drive and can convert them into Google spreadsheets format in just one go by enabling some settings. To enable the setting in the Google Drive, follow the below steps:
- First, open your Google Drive at “drive.google.com
- After that, click on the “Settings” icon at the top of the screen and then click on the “Settings” option.
- Now, tick mark the “Convert uploads to Google Docs editor format” to enable it, and all the CSV files in your Google Drive will get converted into Google Spreadsheets.
Copy and Paste the CSV File into Google Sheets
If any time you experience an error in importing the CSV file, that time the best way of doing it would be to copy the data from the CSV file and paste it directly into the Google Spreadsheet.
- First, open the CSV file in any word processor or Excel.
- Once opened, copy the entire data from there.
- Now, open the blank, Google Spreadsheet and simply paste it over here.
- In the end, select the entire pasted data and go to the “Data” tab and click on “Split to columns” and it will get split into the columns
Convert or Export Google Spreadsheet into CSV File
- Open the spreadsheet, and go to the sheet which you want to convert into CSV format.
- After that, go to the “File” tab, then hover the mouse on the “Download” option and click on “Comma-separated values (.csv).
